Mel Gibson dragged into tyres recycling lawsuit

It’s not often you get to drop in the name of a notorious Hollywood A-lister when you’re tasked with writing about tyres – but Nader Sherif has made that possible.

Sherif is claiming in a lawsuit that non-other-than Mel Gibson cajoled him to put his life savings into a newfangled technology to recycle tyres on the promise that if he needed to get his money back he could.

You can probably see where this is leading…

According to the lawsuit – which has been obtained by celebrity news website Tmz.com – Sherif claims that at a dinner in 2007 Gibson sold him on the idea that “Green Rubber was a new ‘green’ rubber company that was going to be wildly successful and that he should seriously consider investing into it.”

But he only agreed to pay the $200,000 (£125,000) investment fee after Gibson and his associate assured him the company would re-purchase Sherif’s stock whenever he wanted out of the deal.

Sherif also alleges that Gibson, who is a “significant investor” in the company, then told him if the company wouldn’t make good, the actor himself would buy the shares back for the full $200,000.

The recession left Sherif needing the cash back, but when he approached Green Rubber bosses and asked them to buy his stock back, they reportedly refused and when he went back to Gibson he allegedly ignored his demand.